All of the world's flights in 72 seconds

The skies really are very busy these days. To prove it, Karl Rege's team at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland has produced an animation that shows the paths of all of the world's commercial flights over a 24-hour period.

The animation's complexity belies the simplicity with which it was made. Apparently all of the flight information came from a single website - Flightstats - which is, in itself, a sign of how small the world has become.

As Wired points out, this is simply the latest - if by far the most ambitious - of these moving flight maps. Aaron Koblin, an "Artist|Designer|Researcher" in San Francisco produced this eerie map of just US skies a few years ago.